Websites can go down at any time, and unplanned outages tend to happen at the worst possible times. But most professional Web teams try to make their planned outages as non-disruptive as possible. In fact, at many of the companies I've built websites for, even updating existing Web pages has to happen at off hours, especially if it's a major change. At one company I worked for, any change to the website that required the server to be stopped and restarted had to happen during our lowest traffic times. That was around 2am where I live. The idea was to minimize the impact. But another company I worked for has no problem taking parts of the website down for maintenance even during business hours. The overtime costs for developers working outside of business hours out-weighed the potential loss of revenue from taking the site down. What do you think? What times of the day is it okay to take a website or part of a website down for maintenance? If it depends, please explain in the comments.

Poll: When is an acceptable time to take a site down for planned maintenance? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 06:18:16.

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